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Wednesday, May 24, 2017

I had narrowly escaped the God issue, I thought, though
maybe I hadn’t. Yes, I conceded that there were miracles all around us, and
indeed within us. I granted—perhaps arrogantly?—that since it is
unbelievably-next-to-impossible that we should be here, the jump to the shores
of God was a short hop indeed. And then I said that God made Himself known, and
spoke to me, through music.

Right—took care of that!

And so I ventured on to Chapter 5, which is entitled How it
Works. ‘Aha,’ I thought, ‘home free! We’ll get down to a few practical details,
a bit of “how-to,” and then we’ll be on our way! We can tiptoe around the God
issue once again!’

Big mistake!

In fact, I had bemoaned the need to cook up a Higher Power
to my sister-in-law, who is as godless as I am. She is, however, one of the
best people I know, as well as being a virtually teetotaler, which in my family
is unheard of. Anyway, she had the answer….

“Why not have the best part of you be your Higher Power? You
know, the part of you that is loving, generous, wise…”

She continued on to list other adjectives—places I’ve read
about but never visited, much less settled.

“It’s not that easy,” I told her, because by then I had
waded past the twelve steps (daunting by themselves) and gotten into the real
meat of the chapter. I had read (or thought I had, since I can’t find it now)
the paragraph that says that people who try to lead “good lives,” or who “try
to act morally”—sorry, but these people are outta luck! No, dammit, step three
means just what it says, and no weaseling or pussyfooting! Here it is, dammit!

“Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care
of God as we understood Him.”
(Italics in the original.)

Well—I’ll out myself. My biggest fear is of living in a
world in which people have turned over their will and lives to the care of God as they understood Him. Which is why,
today, I have not read much about the bombing in Manchester, England,
immediately following a pop concert that attracted mostly teenagers. 22 people
are dead, including (it’s thought) the man who made the IED. (Remember the
first time you learned that IED was an “improvised explosive device?” Before
then, they were just homemade bombs….)

So I can’t tell you much about the guy who killed 22 people
yesterday. I don’t know his background, and I’ve really stopped caring. It was
clear after the Boston marathon bombings that reading the biographies, getting
the back story, watching the sobbing mother and the angry father—all of that was
not going to explain how a suburban Boston man could put a pressure-cooker filled
with nails and a timer in front of a child. Yes, a child he must have seen. But
is there any doubt that he was giving his life and his will (as well as several
other lives and wills) to his God as he
understood Him?

This is extreme, of course. But I could also recount an
experience that happened to me the last time I went into swimming in a pool.

We were in St. Thomas, staying at a hotel instead of
enduring the San Sebastian Festival. And among the hotel were a young couple,
clearly Muslim: the woman was draped in full-length black robe, and wore hijab, or head covering. We observed her
as we frolicked in the pool, which was dangerous even for me, tall and a strong
swimmer. Why? The first ten feet or so gradually deepened, but in a footstep
the water went from being at shoulder level to being over my head. And it was
into this pool that the young Muslim women entered. Dressed, yes, fully in her
robe and her headscarf.

It was lunacy, and no, I don’t think that Allah—as I
understand him—cared a fig whether she wore her robe and her hijab into the
pool. I cared, and I’m sorry to say, cared almost more for the hapless person
who might have to rescue her. I thought it might be me, trying to drag an
hysterical, panicking body wrapped in yards of waterlogged fabric out of
danger.

It’s easy for atheists to make these criticisms. I freely
grant you that we do not—we freethinkers—set up soup lines, feed the homeless,
shelter runaways, visit the aged and infirm, and do a host of other good things
that good churches do.

And I’ve got step 1 down pat, I’m pleased to say. Powerless
over alcohol? See the picture below for a glimpse of how I looked, and how I
was feeling, and admission to rehab the second time around.

So—the Big Book told me to scurry around and find a God.
Well, I did the best I could, and thought rather smugly that I hadn’t done
badly. After all, I dragged poor Boethius into it, and he seems to have given
up the consolations of philosophy and living about a millennium and a half ago.

It was the best I could do. I am truest to the godhead, at
least as I understand it, when I
listen to music. So yesterday, I abandoned myself to the Lamentations of
Jeremiah, which are usually listened to in the Tenebrae. I had heard about the Lamentations, and I had read
about the Tenebrae, but I never knew much about it until I went to the grocery
store. There, I ran into the Episcopalian minister who was the partner to the
manager of the gay bathhouse. Since the wait in line at the checkout is usually
as long as Lent itself, I got a full description of the glorious music of
Thomas Tallis, and of the precise order in which the fourteen candles or more
are extinguished. The minister painted a wonderfully evocative of the darkening
and then darkened church (Tenebrae deriving from the Latin word for shadow).
Wikipedia, here, will have to suffice:

The principal Tenebrae ceremony is the gradual
extinguishing of candles upon a stand in the sanctuary called a hearse.[7] Eventually, the Roman
Rite settled on fifteen candles, one of which is extinguished after each of the
nine psalms of Matins and the five of Lauds, gradually reducing the lighting
throughout the service. The six altar candles are put out during the
Benedictus, and then any remaining lights in the church. The last candle is
hidden beneath the altar, ending the service in total darkness. The strepitus
(Latin for "great noise"), made by slamming a book shut, banging a hymnal or breviary against the pew, or
stomping on the floor, symbolizes the earthquake that followed Christ's death,
although it may have originated as a simple signal to depart.[8] After the candle has been
shown to the people, it is extinguished, and then put "on the credence
table," or simply taken to the sacristy. All rise and then leave in
silence.[9]

Ah
yes! The very stuff that got good Pope Benedict (nee Josef Ratzinger) out of
bed in the morning!

Well,
Jeremiah has been lamenting through virtually every Renaissance composer, and I
was tempted to do de Morales, again, but decided on Palestrina. I wanted to get
to the bottom of the Jeremiah problem as he
(Palestrina) understood him.

Well,
I should have done all this in the Triduum, or the last three days of Holy
Week, but I was busy this year. In fact, the week before Holy Week, I was being
detoxified, which involved toxifying
myself with Ativan instead of alcohol. The alcohol banished, the hospital then
sent me home to detoxify from the Ativan. The process was nearly as bad as
going cold turkey from the drink, and occupied much of Holy Week. At the end of
it all, I was more ready to join the Filipinos for a little crucifixion
reenactment than a sedate darkening of a church into shadows.

The
second problem was that I had never gotten around to reading the Book of
Jeremiah (and I still haven’t), nor had I read the Book of Lamentations, of
whom Jeremiah was once thought to be the author. So I settled right down to
work on the Lamentations, which I read in the King James Version, although on
my Zenfone Asus 5.0. After all, if it can play music, surely it could “read”
(as in display text) the Bible.

Well,
I’m happy to say that for once God behaved like an adult and started acting not as I understood Him. No, this God
was a downright Old Testament Son of a Bitch, and didn’t the sons and daughters
of Jerusalem deserve it? Ahh, it was good lip-smacking stuff! It took me back
to my childhood, it did, when I used to watch my father in church, every
Sunday, being forced to admit that he was a “miserable sinner.” If God could
get the old man to fess up to that, I thought, he had to be some kick-ass god
indeed. What my black son would call a regular Niggah!

It
was so good, indeed, that I started copying and pasting—you don’t want to lose
all this stuff back into the Bible, after all. And that meant that I was
copying and pasting virtually chapter and verse. Here’s where the action is
just heating up….

1:12 Is it nothing to you, all ye
that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which
is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce
anger.

13 From
above hath he sent fire into my bones, and it prevaileth against them: he hath
spread a net for my feet, he hath turned me back: he hath made me desolate and
faint all the day.

Wonderful, heady stuff! And had I read it—or heard it sung—in a darkening
church a night or two before the resurrection, it would have spoken very
exactly to my condition. Because being in rehab, and especially being in the
throes of alcohol poisoning that preceded it, was to be in sorrow like unto no
sorrow, to have been afflicted with the Lord’s fierce anger, to have received
his fire into my bones, and to have been desolate and faint all the day.

God had done one number on Jerusalem, clearly—Sodom and Gomorrah had been
a mere warm-up for the real deal. And whoever wrote the Lamentations certainly
had the conviction of a great writer: he had clearly told every diligent editor
to go to Hell. I myself was craving a red pencil as much as I craved the bottle,
but the author held my nose rigorously down in the mud. He described every
degradation, every humiliation, every devastation, and then he turned around
and drove back through the country all over again. My rehab days began to glow
quite pinkly in my memory as I read on through Lamentations!

In fact, rehab has a certain kind of wonderful. There is only one thing
to be done, and that is to endure it. You go through an almost sadistic rite of
initiation (I was stripped naked, patted down—who knew if a razor blade might
not be lurking in my hair)? I was forced to bend my knees and lower my waist to
my ankles, stretch my arms and cough. All under the cruel, unblinking eye of an
“aide.” You are then led to a room, where there is a bedframe, a mattress, and
linen. You are exhausted, as much by the completely sleepless night you have
endured as by the effort of seeing your loved one see you, at your
absolute worst moment.

At last, on that first day of my second journey into rehab, I found
myself on the bed I had made—in both senses. A nurse had come in my room
bearing comfort, also in two senses. She gave me the 2 mg of Ativan, and then,
remembering our last conversation in the previous hospitalization, said, “hey,
you tried. That’s good!”

There was then nothing to do. I could sleep, and did. Somebody would
bring me food. There was great freedom in being locked away, since I did not
have to struggle with the question: should I, or even could I, go down to CVS
and buy the cheapest bottle of scotch? Should I, could I, make it through the
day to dinnertime, when my husband would come home? What kind of shape would I
be in? Would I be slurring my words, stumbling at the table, breaking wine
glasses and dropping cutlery? How much work would it take to try and fake being
sober, and how likely would it be that I would succeed?

And the worst question of all: assuming I could get through the evening,
what sort of night would I have? If I tell you that I was anxious, the night
before I went into rehab, will you know what that was? Imagine falling from a
skyscraper: you are plummeting downward. In fact, you should be exhilarated,
thrilled finally to feel your body free from the ground, from the bonds of the
earth. You are, in fact, terrified, because you know that in one second your
body will explode against the pavement, and your life, in one cataclysm of pain
and blood, will be over.

That one second before the crash? I lived that one second for eight
hours, as I counted each quarter hour down to the time I could get up and go to
the hospital.

I had brought it on myself, of course. God had had nothing to do with it:
he had not put the bottle to my lips, he had not extended my arm to reach for
the booze that I hid under my bed. No, no—he had not brought me to this.

But what if he had? He had destroyed Jerusalem, and the Jews, though
lamenting, had still welcomed the destruction, or at least granted the justice
or the fitness of the punishment. Why could I not say, as a man might have a
few centuries before, that God had brought me very low? That He had cast me
among the swine, the lepers, the unclean? I cannot claim to know Him, nor do I
know his will.

I can only say that He had been there, as I lay drunk in my bed, and got
drunker.

And he had been there as well, when finally I came into my room in rehab.
It was empty, as empty as the bare mattress awaiting its sheets and human
cargo. No, there was nothing in that room, nothing at all. Housekeeping had
come, cleaned the blood and tears from the walls and the mattress. They had
polished the mirror carefully: no trace of a creased and leaden visage remained
there. A squirt from the can had freshened the air. It was only I, sleepless
and drunk, who saw the figure on the mattress. He’d been waiting, after all,
and he looked up, smiled slightly, less at me than what he knew of me. He
shifted a bit. It seemed, after all of this time, that at last, in this
infinite emptiness, there was room for God and for me.

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!